Toyota Offers A Bounty, For Referrals To Get Recalled Takata Airbags Replaced

Traditional means like postcards and letters aren’t working fast enough to whittle down a backlog of millions of faulty Takata airbags.

So Toyota Motor Sales USA has turned to a social media campaign to offer customers gift cards to act as “ambassadors,” to persuade their contacts to check if their airbags are recalled, and to get them replaced if necessary. Millions of Takata-brand airbags, which are in wide use across the entire industry, have been recalled. In some cases, the bags have blown metal shrapnel towards the driver if they go off in a crash.

“We’re trying to leverage a basic human behavior, of people wanting to help other people,” said Tony Lim, co-founder and president of the Carma Project, Costa Mesa, Calif., in a phone interview on April 30.

Toyota wants customers to check whether their Takata air bags have been recalled.

Photo: Toyota

That, plus there’s money.

In the form of prepaid gift cards to various retailers, the Carma Project offers its “ambassadors” $5 for every one of their contacts who follows the prescribed steps to check whether their vehicle’s airbag is part of the Takata recall. For every contact who actually gets their airbag replaced, the program offers the ambassador another $50 gift card.

So far, Lim said more than 16,000 people have signed up in roughly four months since the project was launched, in December 2018. The Carma Project is open to signing up other manufacturers, too, but to date Toyota Motor Sales USA is the only participating car company, he said.

According to data Lim provided from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, over the last few years out of more than 55 million Takata airbags that were subject to recall so far — the biggest auto recall ever — about 17.4 million still haven’t been replaced, as of April 12.

That makes the average completion rate 68.5%, but Lim said there’s a lot of variation among brands. By volume of recalled airbags, the 10 biggest brands affected by the recall range from a completion rate of only 25.5% for Mercedes-Benz, to 83.7% for Honda and Acura combined, the data said. Toyota has a 68.2% completion rate, about average for the industry.